Category Archives: 85-89 points

Laphroaig 9, 2001, Again(SMWS 29.88)

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So my planned schedule for the second half of last week fell apart completely. What I’d failed to account for when I made those best-laid plans was that my new term and school year starts today and that while getting ready to write syllabi, meet with new advisees etc. I would suddenly receive some urgent and unmissable deadlines on a project I’ve been trying to bring to a close for a while (more on this later, if you don’t know what it is, or even if you do). The good news is I still have a booze review for you this week. The bad news is that it is a return to a whisky I have reviewed once before: a 9 yo Laphroaig bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society under the name “What a Magnificent and Handsome Nose”.

My previous review was posted in late-February 2020 (just before you-know-what hit). That review was from a sample swap with someone whose identity I had failed to log in my spreadsheet. I’d noted then that I had a bottle of my own of the whisky (and that I had also failed to log where I’d acquired it from and for how much). Well, my memory is no better now but I am glad anyway to have opened the bottle; and I’m curious to see what I make of it now. Continue reading →

Laphroaig 14, 1998 (Signatory for Binny’s)

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Back to whisky for the first booze review of the month. I have for you today a bit of a throwback. This Laphroaig 14, 1998, bottled from a single bourbon hogshead, was one of Binny’s barrel picks back in 2012. This was right around the time that I had begun to purchase whisky in a big way. Back then shipping from liquor stores around the US to Minnesota was not a complicated affair and I purchased many a bottle from Binny’s (in Chicago) in that era. Indeed, one of my favourite Laphroaigs in that phase of my whisky exploration had been another Laphroaig bottled by Signatory and selected by Binny’s. That one was 19 years old and was also from a single bourbon cask. My guess is that is what led me to purchase this 14 yo; that and the fact that in those days prices were extremely reasonable and Brett Pontoni and his crew’s single barrel picks were extremely reliable. I can’t actually tell you how much I paid for this as, unusually, I didn’t record any of the purchase information in my otherwise detailed whisky spreadsheet. The 19 yo had been $110 in 2010, and so I imagine this was a fair bit cheaper. I have no idea what Binny’s prices and selection of single malts are like these days—I’ve not kept up with Binny’s in recent years, as shipping became complicated and then impossible a while ago. Anyway, let’s get to it. Continue reading →

Orkney Distillery 13, 2007 (Single malts of Scotland)

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Alright, after an unplanned three week hiatus—caused by my falling ill after coming back from Delhi earlier this month—let’s get the weekly booze reviews back on track. I’m still sticking to my plan of only reviewing my own bottles, which means no more than four reviews a month (as the goal of this plan is to drink down my collection and not to proliferate the number of open bottles on my shelf.

Most recently opened is this 13 yo from an undisclosed Orkney distillery, put together in 2020 from three sherry casks containing spirit distilled in 2007. Well, in reality everyone knows the distillery is Highland Park. The bottler is The Single Malts of Scotland, whose relationship to the Whisky Exchange is something I can never keep straight in my head. It’s possible that they’re now completely different entities. I purchased this bottle from Whiskybase in early 2021 for what was a reasonable price for a 13 yo sherry cask malt: €58. I’m sure anything similar would now cost quite a bit more. Ah well. I opened this bottle a week or so ago; time to finally take some notes. Continue reading →

Ben Nevis 18, 1996 (Whiskybase)

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Another week, another Whiskybase release. Unlike last week’s Littlemill 25 or the previous week’s Caol Ila 30, however, this was not a release under their Archives label. Instead, it’s one of the regular Whiskybase labels used for releases that commemorate milestones reached on their invaluable database. This Ben Nevis 18 was bottled in February 2015 to mark the 60,000th entry in Whiskybase. That number is now much, much higher (though I can’t recall if I have any of the later commemorative releases—I’m away from my whisky lair right now). This was from a single sherry butt and the colour of the whisky suggests it might have been an oloroso butt (or at least an European oak cask). Ben Nevis, like Littlemill, has one of Scotland’s most idiosyncratic profiles. Like Littlemill, its spirit is usually quite fruity but, also like Littlemill, the fruit is often intermingled with other notes that are not to everyone’s taste. I’m generally a big fan and so am hoping for good things from this bottle. Let’s see how it goes. Continue reading →

Littlemill 25, 1988 (Archives)

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I returned to whisky reviewing last week with a 2012 release from Whiskybase under their Archives label: this Caol Ila 30, 1982. Here now is a review of another Archives release, this one a little younger and bottled a couple of years later.

As I’ve noted before, the long-defunct Littlemill distillery did not have a very strong reputation—putting it mildly—when it was active. However, casks of spirit distilled there in the late 1980s and early 1990s and allowed by the vagaries of business history to mature longer than was probably ever intended quickly developed a reputation for fruity excellence when parcels began to be released by various independent bottlers in the early-mid 2010s. Whiskybase’s Archives releases of some of these casks played no small role in the rehabilitation of the distillery’s reputation after its demise. I’ve reviewed some of these before as I have some from other bottlers. Just last year I reviewed a Littlemill 24, 1989 from Archives and a Littlemill 22, 1989 from Glen Fahrn. Both were excellent, especially the 22 yo. Will this 25 yo distilled in 1988 be as good? Let’s see. Continue reading →

Ardbeg 10, 2008 Release

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The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that this is the first post on the blog in almost three weeks. I’m sorry to say that I had a death in the family. This meant a return to Delhi at the end of the month to join my family in the mourning period. And since getting back to Minnesota last week I have been submerged in both jet lag and work, not having been able to get anything done for quite some time. It will probably take some time to return to the normal blog posting schedule but I did have this review done a while ago and so here it is. This is a review of a standard release, a classic: the Ardbeg 10. But it’s not a recent release. This is from 2008 (the L8 bottle code), which was from the first release of the 10 yo made from spirit distilled under the Glenmorangie ownership which had begun in 1997. The “Very Young”, the “Still Young”, the “Almost There” and the “Renaissance” were the special releases that had led up to this first regular release of the new 10 yo. Despite having consumed a few bottles of this over the years, I’ve never reviewed it. I guess I must have assumed I already had. Anyway, I’m glad to have caught the omission now that I’ve opened my last bottle. This review will slot in between my reviews of the 2007 and 2009 releases. Continue reading →

Littlemill 24, 1989 (Archives for the CasQueteers)

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Last week I reviewed a 30 yo single malt (the 2017 release of the Talisker 30). Here now is one slightly younger. This Littlemill was distilled in 1989 and bottled in 2014 by Whiskybase for their Archives label on behalf of a Dutch whisky enthusiast group named the CasQueteers. It was one of several older Littlemills from the 1988-92 era that were bottled in the early-mid 2010s, many of the others also by Whiskybase (one of whose founders, Menno Bachess is a well-known Littlemill collector). I’ve reviewed a few of these Littlemills before, including some others distilled in 1989. Such were this 22 yo also bottled by Whiskybase, this 22 yo bottled by Glen Fahrn, and this 24 yo bottled by the Whisky Agency. And I’ve reviewed a bunch of others from 1990 too, as well as a few from 1988. What all of them have in common are the qualities that made Littlemill celebrated not when the distillery was on the go but when these accidentally aged single casks were released long after it had been demolished and the ground it had stood on plowed with sand (well, it was turned into a block of flats). Those qualities could perhaps be summed up by my description of this 24 yo on Instagram a couple of days ago: a cocktail of tropical fruit and diesel. I’ve had this bottle open for a few days now; it’s time to expand on that note. Continue reading →

Talisker 30, 2017 Release

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My first whisky release of the month was of a 3 yo American craft malt whiskey, the Zeppelin Bend from New Holland Distillers in Michigan. For the second, let’s go across the Atlantic to Skye for a much older single malt whisky. This is the Talisker 30 that was released in 2017. It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a Talisker 30. The last was a bottle from the 2015 release, which I quite liked. Before that I’d reviewed the 2006 and 2012 releases. Of those three only the 2006 was at cask strength. The last of the cask strength releases of the Talisker 30 came out in 2010, I think (I have a bottle of that in reserve). After that, all the releases have been at Talisker’s standard 45.8%. Despite the lowered strength, I had quite enjoyed my bottle of the 2015 release and I’d hoped this will be in a similar vein. Early pours were promising and now that the bottle has been open for a week or so, here are my notes. Continue reading →

Cinco Sentidos, Cuishe, Tio Tello

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I guess this is a month of mezcal reviews. I kicked off the month with an excellent ensamble by Tio Rey in Oaxaca for Vago. Last week, I reviewed a cenizo made for Legendario Domingo by the Colon family in Michoacán. This week I’m back in Oaxaca. This mezcal was distilled from cuishe/cuixe, a variant of wild agave karwinskii (from which come a number of magueys used to distill mezcal). The mezcalero is Eleuterio “Tio Tello” Perez Ramos and the bottler is Cinco Sentidos, the brand from El Destilado restaurant in Oaxaca. As per the label, the production process was pretty artisanal: the maguey was roasted in conical ovens with mesquite and oak for five days, chopped by hand with machetes, and then mashed with hammers also made of mesquite. Fermentation took place in tanks made of cypress before distillation in a copper alembic still. Interestingly, the label also says that this was distilled in 2008 but only bottled in 2024. Since it’s still a joven I guess that means it spent 16 years in glass containers. I don’t know enough about mezcal to be able to say for sure but I think that’s a pretty long time compared to most. Technically, I suppose the spirit shouldn’t change in the glass but anybody who has opened bottles of whisky that were filled decades prior knows that “bottle maturation” is a thing. Anyway, having enjoyed Cinco Sentidos’ offerings before (well, their mole pechuga, a little less), I’m looking forward to this one. Let’s see what it’s like. Continue reading →

Legendario Domingo, Cenizo

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Legendario Domingo bottle mezcals made in various states of Mexico. As far as I can make out from their website, they currently have five labels, each covering batches of mezcal from a producer in a different region: Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi and Durango. This particular bottle is from the Colon family mezcalera from Nombre de Dios in Durango. It is made from a variety of maguey that I have never tried before (though that’s true of the majority of them): Cenizo; and I believe this is also the first mezcal from Durango that I have reviewed. The mode of production is quite different from that of the Vago Ensamble I reviewed last week. That one is a mezcal ancestral, the agave ground by hand and the spirit distilled in clay stills. This is a mezcal artesenal. The agave is roasted in an undeground oven but milled with an electric shredder; and the distillation happens in an alembic still. What it does have in common with Vago, however, is the general illegibility of the label. Thankfully, the labels are at least colour-coded for the different producers, so if this review inspires you to go out and look for this one, just keep an eye out for the purple label (though I’m not sure, I think each producer makes mezcal for Legendario Domingo from the same maguey each time). Okay, let’s get to it. Continue reading →

Vago Ensamble, Tio Rey

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Mezcal Vago has a colourful origin story—which you can read on their website—and bottles with colour-coded labels that are not very easy to read. The most important information comes—since, I think, their brand design a couple of years ago—from the colour of the label, which indicates which of the four Oaxacan mezcaleros they work with has produced the spirit in the bottle. The deep red label of this bottle, for instance, identifies the mezcal as the handiwork—and I do mean handiwork, as the cooked agave is mashed by hand before fermentation and distillation in barros or clay pot stills—of Salomon Rey Rodriguez, better known as Tio Rey. The broad strokes are legible enough on the front of the label: the mezcal is an ensamble comprised of spirit made from the espadín, arroqueño and coyote magueys. But if you want to find out the exact composition from the side of the label, you’ll need very strong eyes and/or reading glasses. As the owner of eyes that are weaker every year, and of very cheap reading glasses, I needed to take a picture with my phone and blow it up to read the text. I was eventually able to make out that this batch contains 68% espadín, 20% arroqueño and 12% coyote; and also that every ensamble produced by Tio Rey is unique in composition and therefore profile. (And it turns out that, in keeping with the general handmade ethos of the operation, even the labels are produced from the recycled mash from the distillation.) So unless it’s from the same batch as mine (see the lot number below), these notes may not have much to do with your bottle of Vago Ensamble from Tio Rey. With that caveat, let’s see what this is like. Continue reading →

Gusto Historico, Madrecuixe, Victor Ramos

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I opened this month’s booze reviews with a mezcal (this excellent ixterro amarillo from Chacolo) and so I may as well close the month’s reviews with another mezcal. This is a release from Gusto Historico, an outfit set up by Marco Ochoa, one of the founders of Mezcaloteca, a well-known mezcaleria in Oaxaca. They are relatively new to the American market. They feature mezcals that are all made, I believe, in Miahuatlán in Oaxaca. They work with a number of maestros but the few releases I’ve seen in stores in the Twin Cities all seem to be made by Victor Ramos (whose mezcal has also been released by Mal Bien). Such was the release, a tobala, that I reviewed just about a year ago and such is the release I’m reviewing today: made from the madrecuixe maguey. This species of maguey apparently takes a long time to mature and has a low yield, which means it mostly appears in small-batch releases. I think this may be my first-ever madrecuishe—I’ve only taken baby steps into the world of mezcal over the last couple of years—and so I can’t tell you how typical this particular expression is of the broader varietal. I can tell you that I’ve had the bottle open for a few days now and have really been enjoying it. Here now are my notes. Continue reading →

Tamdhu 9, 1989 (Cadenhead)

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Back when I became a deranged whisky person, there was a store in Burnsville, MN that had a pretty interesting collection of malts at quite fair prices: Blue Max. Well, they’re still around, but under new ownership for a while now and the old magic—to say nothing of the old stock and the old pricing—is long gone. I took chances on a number of independent releases there more than a decade and a half ago, whiskies about which very little information was available. Among them were several releases from the old Cadenhead’s Authentic Collection series in dark green bottles (including this Ardmore that I just adore). I don’t actually recall purchasing this young Tamdhu (Tamdhu-Glenlivet on the label) and it’s sat hidden in a corner of my whisky hoard for a long time now. I found it while looking for a non-peated bourbon cask whisky to round out my current lineup of open bottles (I like to have a spectrum of profiles on hand). I was a bit nervous while opening it. It was bottled in 1999 and there’s always a good chance a cork will come apart after 26 years. Thankfully, that did not happen. I’m also happy to say that I quite liked the first few pours from the bottle. It’s been open now for a few days and here therefore are my notes. Continue reading →

Laphroaig Cairdeas 2025, Lore Cask Strength

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I finally got my hands on a bottle of the 2025 Laphroaig Cairdeas. Just the one bottle though. Which means my collection of Cairdeas since 2011 might end in 2024 with the Cask Favorites. You see, I’ve been buying two bottles of the Cairdeas every year, one to drink and one to keep. (Well, in some excellent years—see the 2015 200th anniversary release— I bought more than two.) I fully acknowledge that this is a very silly enterprise. The Cairdeas has been up and down over the last 7-8 years; pretty good in some years; ho hum in others; nothing to really get me going since that 2015 release. Laphroaig’s approach to Cairdeas in recent years has something to do with that as they’ve either released wacky wine cask finishes or cask strength iterations of releases from their regular line. Last year’s release was particularly heavy on the “we’ve run out of ideas” subtext, being composed of casks from the previous two years. Which brings us to this year’s release, which the distillery says is a cask strength version of the Lore (yes, a whisky from their regular line). As to whether this truly is a cask strength version of the regular Lore is not clear: I’ve seen reports of people being told at the distillery that it was only made in the same way as the Lore, i.e with the same mix of cask types. If you know more about this, please write in below. In any case, I thought the Lore was fine when I reviewed it on release in 2017 but was never moved to go back and try more recent versions of it. However, this was made, I’m hoping it’s better. Let’s see. Continue reading →

Chacolo, Ixtero Amarillo

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It’s been a while since my last mezcal review. That review was of an añejo or aged mezcal (from Rancho Vale Madre in Oaxaca). Let’s get back now to joven or unaged mezcal, which is what I mostly drink. Technically, what I am reviewing today is not a mezcal. But only technically. Chacolo, you see, are located in Jalisco outside the Denomination of Origen for mezcal and so cannot use that name on their labels. But in every non-bureaucratic way this is mezcal, made in an exacting manner. Chacolo use the capon method of “castrating” the agave plant as it begins to send up a flowering stalk. But where most producers who use this method, leave the plants in the fields to concentrate their sugars for a few months, Chacolo let them rest for 3-4 years. Indeed, the mezcal I am reviewing today is made from Ixtero Amarillo maguey to which the capon process was applied for 4 years. Ixtero Amarillo is a variety of agave rhodacantha, and is an outlier in their fields: all the other agave they use are varieties of agave angustifolia, from which come most of the well-known types of mezcal. Another feature of interest is that the family’s fields are on volcanic soil, which is said to confer a greater mineral quality than usual to their mezcals. They are an interesting operation—you can read more about them on Mezcalistas. Continue reading →

Laphroaig 17, 1995 (The Whisky Agency)

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I haven’t reviewed a Laphroaig in a while (this 21 yo bourbon cask, back in February). I was hoping to set that right this month with a review of the 2025 Cairdeas, but I haven’t yet come across it in Minnesota. That’s not to say it’s not here; I’ve not looked very hard: just on a few stores’ websites. If any of my local readers have a line on where it’s available, please let me know. In the meantime, here’s a review of another bourbon cask Laphroaig. Like February’s 21 yo, this is also an indie release from a while ago—from The Whisky Agency—but it’s a bit younger at 17 years of age. It’s also from a slightly smaller cask: a barrel to the 21 yo’s refill hogshead. I do prefer hogsheads and refill hogsheads in particular to the smaller barrels, as they have less oak contact—and in the case of the refill casks, that contact is with less active oak. But I’ve had some very nice bourbon barrel Laphroaig before (this 19 yo, for example) and so have no reason to think that this one will be anything but good. Let’s see if my positivity will be rewarded. Continue reading →

Glengoyne 12 CS, Pre-2012 Release

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Looking at my cabinet of open bottles, I noticed I did not have any younger sherried whiskies open that do not have any peat involvement. It’s not that I have anything against peated and sherried whiskies—why, some of my best friends are peated and sherried whiskies; it’s just that it’s nice to have some variety on hand. And so down I went into my whisky dungeon to see if there were any candidates for opening. There was this bottle of Glengoyne 12 CS. I remembered where I’d purchased it—Lowry Hills Liquor in Minneapolis—but not when. My spreadsheet—very assiduously updated in those days—tells me it was in 2012. I then looked for a bottle code to see if I could pin the release year down further and this is what I found etched towards the bottom of the bottle: L5109BB and below it, 3 15:46. Normally I would guess this meant it was bottled on the 109th day of 2005 at 3.46 pm but I confess I don’t really know how Glengoyne’s bottle codes worked then (or now, for that matter) and there does not seem to be any intel on that online. If you know more about it, please write in below. What I can tell you is that I don’t have so very much experience with Glengoyne; I’ve reviewed very few—the last almost exactly three years ago. But I’ve generally enjoyed what I’ve had even if I have not yet encountered one I thought to be remarkable. I can tell you that this bottle is not going to break that streak (I had purchased more than one back then and I have the score I’d assigned then, in my pre-blog days, recorded in my spreadsheet). But I’m glad to make its acquaintance again anyway. Continue reading →